In Conversation: Kerry McCoy of Deafheaven
On the tenth anniversary of Sunbather, the guitarist is grateful to re-experience their classic album in the present tense—free from the afflictions that went into making it.
For as long as I’ve been making records, I’ve carried with me the uncomfortable feeling of making something “permanent.” It’s not just the songs—although that, too, plays a role—but the inspirations, the feelings, the conditions, and the physical places that also find themselves folded into the permanent shape of an “album.” Nothing puts that into clearer focus than a milestone anniversary.
I approached Deafheaven founder/guitarist Kerry McCoy with the idea of exploring these “silent partners” with me as a way to mark the tenth anniversary of their breakthrough album, Sunbather, and in spite of those sometimes difficult memories, he showed no hesitation in his willingness to walk back into those places with me—even when the light was less than flattering. It’s a story of survival anxiety, personal insecurity, unfolding addiction, and even a group recovery. For a band that’s been credited with helping to shape a genre called “Blackgaze,” there’s still something to be said about lifting the darkness.
I used to live in Oakland and my best friend lived in Stockton, so I have some visual memories of that place when I think about you going to your first show there. I kind of wanted to start with you telling me everything you remember about that day.
KERRY: Wow. OK, you mean the first show I went to?
Yes. It was at some kind of Stockton rec center?
KERRY: The Seifert Center, yeah. It was 2002, so I was fourteen and I’d been grounded. My friends and I had all just gotten into punk; I don’t think we even knew what hardcore was at the time. I bought Misfits Collection 2, I bought [At the Drive-In’s] Relationship of Command, and I bought [AFI’s] The Art of Drowning. I am extremely dating myself, but those were my first three CD purchases. I was living in Modesto at the time.
I remember my friend Kevin, his dad dropped us off at the Seifert Center in this big minivan. It’s like the funniest thing, these young teen punks pulling up in a Toyota Sienna or something [laughs]. I remember being very nervous—like, these were the cool grown-up kids and this was actual subversive culture and I am outside of my comfort zone. The headlining band was Thought Riot, who were a local Modesto band that had signed to A-F Records, Anti-Flag’s record label. Looking back on it now, like, I haven’t listened to this band in 15 or 20 years, but I would sum them up as every Northern California band in the early 2000s. They were extremely influenced by AFI, and specifically that era of AFI—which would have been Black Sails in the Sunset and The Art of Drowning. That was “peak AFI” as we used to call it. They were also very political, so I was excited to go see them.
You mentioned feeling a little bit out of your depth when you got there. So there must have also been something there that made you feel like you belonged, or at least like you wanted to belong.
KERRY: I just knew that this was what I wanted to do, essentially. I wanted to go see music all the time, and I wanted to be in a band that could one day play the Seifert Center. I don’t know if I felt like I belonged; I was just drawn to it.
I had a pretty standard millennial suburban upbringing. I was in Stockton, and then my parents got divorced and I went to Modesto. But I would say the thing was that my friends and I… we were, like, losers. It was the same time that I met George [Clarke, Deafheaven singer]. I had horrible acne and greasy hair. I was just your ultimate teenage loser guy, not popular in high school. So I guess [punk] gave me almost a one-up on your normal world of civilians. I was not relating to the musical trends in the mainstream at that time. Before I got into punk and stuff, I bought a couple of your average nu-metal CDs and I just remember being like, “I don’t like this, I don’t relate to the music, I don’t relate to the image, I don’t relate to the kids.” Punk and alternative music and hardcore felt different—it was like, this gives me the thing I want. I don’t know how else to describe it.
I found this interview with you and George from 2012. Sunbather is not a thing yet, so you guys still feel like you have to explain what it is that you’re doing. And George tries to do that—he talks about shoegaze and dream pop, but then he also talks about hardcore and screamo. I don’t remember exactly what you said, but you very specifically objected to his using the word “hardcore,” and he said, “Yeah, hardcore is a touchy word.” Why do you think you would have felt like that in 2012?
KERRY: Yeah, it’s peeling back the onion. In 2012, we were signed to Deathwish. Roads to Judah has been out for a year and a half. We are not quite feeling the burn of “real” black metal guys calling us “false” yet, but that element, to a certain degree, was there from the very beginning. Our first couple of shows I remember people calling us hipsters and cultural tourists and posers or whatever. At that time, Flenser had offered to put our record out, but then [Jacob] Bannon and Tre [McCarthy of Deathwish] offered to put it out. I remember George being like, “We’ve got to do this. This is a chance to get it out there”—and Jonathan [from Flenser] understood it.
So because we were on a hardcore label—at that time Deathwish had signed Touché Amoré and Hope Conspiracy and Blacklisted, all cool bands—I think we were trying to have it both ways. We were on a hardcore label and our booking agent at the time was a hardcore guy. We played Sound and Fury, and we’re doing these hardcore shows and hardcore tours. I remember feeling like we needed to emphasize [our differences]. I think we really wanted to be this mid-aughts Hydra Head kind of thinking-man’s heavy music. A band that did that really well was Converge; they could play the hardcore shows and do weird metal tours. I remember thinking we really needed to lean hard into that.
Which is hilarious to me because, I don’t know if you’ve looked at pictures of yourselves from 2012 or not, but you look like Swing Kids.
KERRY: For sure! [laughs] Totally. And maybe I secretly thought they’re right—that I am a poser and any day now, we’re going to get discovered. It’s this impostor syndrome thing. But at the same time we were also like, “No, we shouldn’t wear corpse paint or do any of that corny ‘we’re in the woods’ [black metal] kind of stuff either,” you know? We were just worried about what people would think, to be honest with you.
You were in your own head.
KERRY: Yes.
I have this very “big tent” idea of hardcore. And I always point back to this story from the ‘90s as kind of my eureka moment in all this. In 1995, I was living with Keith [Burkhardt], who sang for Cause For Alarm in the early eighties. They were a legendary New York hardcore band, and for whatever reason, even though Keith is like ten years older than me, we became really close friends. Anyway, one day I was in my room listening to Sense Field. And Keith walks up to my door and just listens to it. Think about this for a second: If you’re just a regular guy who hears Sense Field out of context, you’re going to hear a rock band. But Keith listens to it—and at this point, he’s not really involved with the scene and he’s never heard Sense Field before—and he just looks at me and goes, “That’s pretty good… They used to be hardcore kids, huh?” And that was just profound to me. Because to this day, I’ve realized that I can listen to anything and be like, “I just know someone in that band is a hardcore kid,” and Google it, and I’ll be right.
KERRY: No, totally! There’s something in the songwriting. I don’t know what it is, but I hear it a lot with metal—like when we have played with bands where you know no one in this band was into punk, everyone in this band came from dipshit forms of metal to what it is now, you can just hear it. I agree with that wholeheartedly.
I was talking to a friend this morning and saying, I don’t think Kerry realizes that there are Heroin songs where, if you put a blast beat underneath it, that’s fucking Deafheaven [laughs].
KERRY: Well, yeah. I remember saying in an interview ten years ago that if you take the same set of chords and you treat them Smithsy, they will become a Cranberries song. If you treat them tin-can rattly, they will become a Darkthrone song. It’s the same chords, but it’s all what palette you want to paint with. That’s such an astute statement [laughs]. Man, that’s such a real thing.
There’s an irony to the Deafheaven narrative over the last ten years—from Sunbather on—where it feels like you’ve been in this weird identity push/pull that I just don’t feel from other bands. It feels like you’re in this constant fight to define yourselves in some way. And the irony is that you are operating in these worlds of hardcore and black metal, which are two genres that really are all about “true” and “false.” They’re all about authenticity and perfect execution of an ideal.
KERRY: It’s baked into the equation. We’ve kind of tried to sum that up by saying, “This is who we are now. Each record is a time capsule of who we are and when we wrote it.” But a big part of it is still having a little bit of that impostor syndrome. Even when [George and I] moved to San Francisco and we started a band within less than a year of being here, I was like, “We can’t tell people we’re from Modesto or they’ll think we’re losers, so we have to say we’re from San Francisco” [laughs]. At the same time, the art is very authentic. But we were still feeling insecure about the realities of the situation—especially as someone in their early twenties. When I was 22 years old, I didn’t start Deafheaven to be like, “Oh, this will be my job one day.” I just wanted to play some house shows and work at Whole Foods.
It’s interesting to me that you bring up that point about being from Modesto, because I think there’s something to be said about the psychology of being a “second town” or “third town” kid, right? Like, you’re not from the big city. You’re not even really from the suburbs of the big city. And Modesto has baggage. Even when I lived in San Francisco, everyone I met from Modesto called it “white trash.” How much of that do you think you internalized growing up?
KERRY: That’s a fucking great question. Wow. I would say a fair amount of it. It kind of goes back to the earlier points, and I’m almost psychoanalyzing myself here, but I remember discovering punk and feeling “other than” and being drawn to it. I remember thinking that this is all I want to do, I’m obsessed with [punk] culture, and I’m going to start dressing a certain way—and this is early 2000s Bush-era culture.
California is a blue state, but a lot of people don’t realize that outside of the main hubs, there are places where you might as well be in the south. So I remember wearing ripped tight black Levis that were sewn with dental floss and Dead Kennedys shirts, and then having lifted trucks driving by with huge American flags on them and getting called names. I remember wearing a white armband to school to protest the Iraq War when I was fifteen and just getting absolutely bullied to an insane degree. There’s a weird contradiction that you have to live with in your head where it’s like, I hate this, I hate this culture, and everyone around me is a fucking idiot, but then realizing that you are also a product of your environment. So I remember going to San Francisco, moving there, and our thinking at the time was that I just wanted to be in a room with people where I didn’t feel like I knew everything they knew.
It’s been pretty well documented that when you moved to San Francisco, you and George were essentially “living in squalor.” I think people liked that idea for your narrative, as if San Francisco is all Golden Gate Park and you were in the gutter. But I’m not sure people fully grasp how dark San Francisco really is. Like, I did not grasp it until I lived there, and when I got there, I remember thinking very much, “I don’t like this” [laughs]. One of the things I’ve talked about a lot about my experience there is that I felt like I was surrounded by people who had verbal ambition and physical atrophy.
KERRY: Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. Absolutely.
So when you moved there, what was your ambition?
KERRY: Wow. OK, well first of all, I’ll say that this is something that me and Mike from Spiritual Cramp have talked about a lot. There’s this phenomenon of it being not cool to try. Like, it’s not cool to try to be a successful band; it’s not cool to go for it. That is a distinctly Bay Area thing, especially compared to L.A., which is almost, I would argue, too far the other way around.
When I moved to San Francisco, George had already moved there ahead of time and he kind of finagled my way into a room with him. My goal was just… I wanted to a do a band and, literally, I had a friend who worked at the Franklin Whole Foods, and I was like, “Fuck, it would be so sick if I could get a job at the Franklin Whole Foods!” [laughs] I went to City College—or at least I took one City College class—and I thought I’d start learning how to be a public high school history teacher. I’ll start that path and then I’ll do the band and we’ll play house shows, and that’s it. It was a dream come true. I was so happy to do that and just be partying all the time.
That last sentence is basically the nexus of verbal ambition and physical atrophy [laughs].
KERRY: Totally. At the time it didn’t feel like that. This gets into alcoholism and addiction and all this kind of stuff, but at the time, that was normal. In my life at the time, everything seemed normal. But if there’s one thing George is really good at—and by proxy, I am as well—is being goal-oriented and making this stuff happen. There were days where I would wake up hungover and ride my bike to Ben & Jerry’s on Haight and Ashbury, where I worked, and then I’d ride my bike from there to CCSF, which is way the fuck out there, take that class, and then ride my bike to my girlfriend’s house on Portrero Hill, and then—after being exhausted because I’m drunk and out of shape all the time—ride back to the Tenderloin to practice for four hours to work on Roads to Judah. Whenever anything had to give, it was always school; it was never the band. It was always just like, “We’ve got to get this done.” And I’m not gonna lie, the other thing is that signing with Deathwish really gave us a boost. When we were working on that record, it really felt like, “We have a shot here. Don’t fuck this up.”
At what point do you feel like the partying became a problem?
KERRY: Oh, a problem-problem. Well, there’s two answers to that question. There’s what me, as a guy who has been sober for almost six years, can see, and there’s the way I would have thought at the time. For me, the guy being sober for six years, I would say my first glimpse of it would have been my living situation before I left for San Francisco. I had a living room in downtown Modesto that I was sharing with two junkies, and I was working at Mr. Pickle’s Sandwich Shop as the pickle sign-holder guy, getting 50 bucks every day, and then taking that back home to these people and doing drugs. It was a quintessential “first thing you learn about drugs is don’t do this”—I was doing that. George saw that and was like, “Get a ride to San Francisco and we’ll figure it out.”
But in my head at the time, it didn’t feel like a problem-problem until 2015. This whole time I was just kind of cruising along, thinking, “Yeah, I do a lot of drugs and whatever, but everybody does. Maybe I do a different one than everybody else, but it’s not affecting the band, it’s not affecting anything.” It wasn’t until writing New Bermuda that I started to feel like it was starting to get kind of crazy.
I’m going to say this, and I don’t want to freak you out at all, but like, I didn’t know you ten years ago. But I knew who you were because we had a ton of mutual friends. And generally speaking, whenever your name was mentioned, there was this aura of like, “Oh, Kerry. He’s kind of dark.” And I always knew what they were alluding to. Which is to say, is it possible that maybe you didn’t really know what the perception of you was at that time?
KERRY: That’s 100 percent possible. I mean, honestly, it’s probably true. I’m going off on my own perceptions of this era—like from 2012 and 2013. 2014 is where it starts, because what happened that year is that we gave a junkie, who has never had any money in his life, a lower-middle class income. What do you think is going to happen? I mean, my memories of the time are being excited and happy and having fun with my friends. And just also doing drugs, a lot.
There’s a saying that I’ve heard people say: It’s fun, and then fun with problems, and then just problems. In my flawed recollection, the Sunbather era was the end of fun and the beginning of fun with problems. I haven’t gone through withdrawals too bad yet. I’m mostly keeping it together. But also, I’m fucking positive there’s friends of ours in common that the first time they met me were like, “He’s fucked up” or “He’s crazy” or “He’s falling asleep chain-smoking” or whatever.
It’s humorous to me that George would have thought the cure to that scene in Modesto was to bring you to San Francisco, the darkest city in the land.
KERRY: You’ve got the Tenderloin open 24-7 [laughs]. But yeah, I don’t know. I mean, he had his own issues and his own stuff he was working through.
OK, but let’s talk about this in the context of Sunbather, because I actually feel like San Francisco plays a major character on the record. I feel a lot of the things that I felt when I lived there when I listen to it—the physical chill, the survival anxiety, the more idyllic parts of the city, and then, obviously, I feel the Tenderloin. Within the scope of what we’ve been talking about, it would be impossible to not talk about “Windows.” It’s so wild that you would think, number one, to make a field recording [of a street drug deal] like that, and then two, put it on a record. So I want to get into the interiority of that, because there are two decisions that had to be made—one, to make the recording, and the other to immortalize it.
KERRY: This kind of goes back again to authenticity, and us feeling this kind of weird backlash from people saying that we are not “true” or whatever. I remember in interviews at the time talking about the Cranberries or Thursday, talking about bands that your average black metal enjoyer would not be talking about. To be honest, I struggle to believe anybody would hear those two bands and not find something they’re going to like in it, but that’s just me. But we wanted to be authentic. We are who we are.
The thinking behind “Windows” was just, this is my reality right now. The idea was like taking a little bit of your own blood and mixing it in the paint for a painting. It was a gritty thing, and it was the reality of my life. In terms of being immortalized, I was just thinking, “Yeah, this is just another Deathwish record. I hope people don’t stop listening to us after this, and I hope we can get some more tours. Because I don’t want to stop going on tour in Europe, that was so fun. I don’t want to never go to Japan again, that was so fun.” That was all we were thinking about. I didn’t think there would be a 25-year-old me buying drugs on Leavenworth forever in there, but that’s me. It was a hard conversation to have with your family, you know?
But that was the thinking of it. This is who we really are. This is real darkness. There’s a song on the record afterwards called “Come Back,” and that’s George essentially writing to me. I remember having a conversation with him at some point and being like, this is crazy. This is actually dark. This is real actual authentic darkness. This isn’t like Satanism or paganism or whatever. This is human beings suffering here, and that’s actual pain and darkness that you’re putting into this art. The genesis of that idea has always been in Deafheaven. “Windows” is coming from that perspective.
It feels like, in the ensuing years, that everybody in the band sort of decided to address their own issues at the same time—whether you’re talking about addiction or mental health or just getting through. Was there actually some sort of collective movement in the band to get better as people?
KERRY: There definitely was. The wheels kind of started to fall off after the touring for New Bermuda, and towards the end of it, our bass player at the time quit. We’re friends with him to this day, he’s a great guy, but he had just had enough. He didn’t want to be in the chaos anymore. He was the first person to stop drinking in the band, and so when you stop drinking and everyone else is so deep in their thing, I can see why you wouldn’t want to be around that anymore. Then Shiv [Mehra] stopped drinking. And then I got sober at the end of November 2017. And then when I got sober, George also decided to stop drinking. It all just spawned this collective feel-good vibe in the band, and it brought everyone back together in a way. It was a thing of realizing that I had had enough, and when George saw that I had enough, I think it made him look at some of his stuff. Shiv had met his now-wife, and she was basically like, “I’m not going to tolerate you if you don’t clean this aspect up,” so he did that too. So we were all kind of in this thing together.
I think the other effect it had on me is that it sort of threw me back into the 15-year-old I was before I started drinking and smoking weed or doing anything. I was just a nerdy little guy who likes to make jokes and play guitar and do all these other things, and that’s actually who I am. That had gotten lost underneath all those layers of gunk.
How would you compare your creativity, sober versus non-sober?
KERRY: It’s not even a comparison in my opinion. There was a point towards the end, before I got sober, where I remember being on stage at the Howard Theatre in D.C., and it was this big show and it was awesome, and I was feeling like, “I cannot wait to get off the stage so I can go backstage and do drugs again”—which is insanity to me! [laughs] Creatively, it was a thing where the second I got sober, “Honeycomb” came out. We had this huge creative burst. But in terms of it for me, there’s no comparison. I think it’s vastly better sober.
I feel like we can’t talk about your sobriety without talking about surfing. And I think I’m the most interested in the way you’ve spoken about surfing in almost spiritual terms because, you know, I know a lot of people in recovery and I hear this, across the board, that one of the things people struggle with the most [in the program] is this concept of a higher power. Was that a thing for you?
KERRY: It was and it wasn’t. I walked into these meetings and saw literature and things on the wall that had the word God in it, and I thought to myself, “This sucks, I’m going to have to be Christian now. But I have to do this or I’m going to die” [laughs]. It was that key of willingness, you know? But then I actually found out that what these groups are referring to when they say “higher power” is not Jesus Christ or Allah or any entity; it’s not even religion. It can be whatever it is. It’s just something outside of yourself. So yes, now I do have a concept of a higher power. It evolves and it’s a loose thing and it works for me, and the cool thing about it is that it doesn't have to be this crazy thing with all these rules.
So the thing about surfing, to me, is that it’s sort of immersing yourself in nature—being a part of it instead of separating yourself. But what is the function for you? How does that make you feel, or what is the draw that makes you feel like it almost has that spiritual component?
KERRY: Man, that’s a great question. Well, I should preface it by saying I got sober before I started surfing, so I already had some of these ideas in my head. And I have read interviews from people who have been surfing their entire lives who have been like, “Man, I wish people would shut the hell up about the ‘spiritual’ part of surfing,” but here I am [laughs].
So first of all, it’s extremely fun. Even sucking at it is fun. And you suck at it especially if you start when you’re 30 years old. You have to watch eight-year-olds shred. But it’s incredibly humbling. It really really emphasizes the idea that there’s a power greater than yourself. One not insignificant chunk about it is that you are completely unplugged from the world. You don’t have your phone, you don’t have anything. It’s just you and you’re out there—sometimes with your friends, sometimes with people you don’t know, sometimes when there’s no one around. I’ve had experiences with all of them. And some of the best ones are when it’s literally just you in the ocean. I’ve had this happen in France and Spain before, where the sun is setting, and sometimes it’s behind some weird castle or something, and it’s giving this pink hue… For me, it fills me with a sense of intense gratitude. Because it’s not something I ever counted on. Surfing was not anything that I thought I was gonna start doing. I would see people do it and I’d think, “It’s freezing in there. Why would you do that? It looks so hard! All I’ve ever heard about it is how hard it is.” But that’s fear-based thinking. So aside from the fact that it’s extremely fun and it’s a good workout, I’ll just have these moments of being out in the water and being like, “Can you believe this is your life?” It literally makes me think I’m in the Matrix or something.
These things are not supposed to happen to me. I’m just a dipshit Nitro Records guy from Modesto and somehow I wound up here. And I have people who care about me and I have people that I care about and I have this band. So what surfing does for me is that it fits into this bigger thing of “I can’t believe this is my life.” I can’t believe it’s ten years later and this many people are going to come to Knockdown Center or this many people are going to come to the Regency. If you had told me then that this is what would be happening now, I would have broken down in tears. I would have been so happy.
What I love about that is this is the first thing we’ve talked about in the entire conversation where I feel like there is no conflict. Every other aspect of the story had some concern or insecurity or conflict. But when you’re speaking about your life now, it’s very much, no. This is it.
KERRY: Yeah, really! And you can learn so much about yourself. The thing about surfing is that you can do things you never thought you’d be able to do. Anyone can do anything within reason. It’s a beautiful thing.
I’ll end with this. I know that your life is very different than it was ten years ago, and I know that when you listen to Sunbather there may even be moments that make you cringe—or at least I know I have records where certain memories or feelings come back that make me cringe. But looking back at that version of yourself, what do you wish you had figured out sooner?
KERRY: Man. A couple of things. It’s probably mostly just centered on self-centeredness. Things I learned through getting sober. But also, every show you play is not the end of the world. Those were the stakes that it felt like at the time. It was either your chance for a career is over if you fuck this up or it’s a total victory. That’s not the case. But because I am who I am, I would lean on people very hard about mistakes they made or I would lean on myself very hard about mistakes I made. That, and then I would say, obviously, if I could go back and see 25-year-old me, the first thing I would do is say, “Get sober. You’ll have superpowers.”
But also there’s this principle I kind of discovered in sobriety, which is: minimum effort yielding maximum results. And what I mean by that is this. I remember when I would get in trouble for lying to my parents about school for so long. My report card would inevitably come, and my dad would be upset because I was a smart kid, but these grades were not reflecting that. He would say, “If you just spent a tenth of the effort you spend trying to lie to me about your school stuff and just apply yourself, you’d be just fine.” My entire life—with certain exceptions, the band being one of them, up to when I got sober—was spent trying to cut corners. It was spent trying to figure out, “What’s the trick here? What’s the scam?” But when I got sober, it kind of rewired my brain. It was like, “You know what? I’m scared to go surfing, but I’m going to go anyway.” Or “I’m scared to go to the gym, but I’m going to go anyway.” Or “I’m scared to go talk to this person, but I’m going to go anyway.” It was realizing that the willingness to just do the thing or show up every day is literally 80 percent of it, in my experience. At the time, I was closed off to the world because I thought to myself, “Oh, you can’t do that” or “That’s going to be hard” or “That’s not going to be comfortable.” I would include getting sober with that. But that’s the thing about that time. I was living in fear and having fear-based decision-making. That’s a huge chunk of what I wish I could go back and change.
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That bit about how the same chords could come from the Cranberries or Darkthrone reminded me of a YouTube video I saw recently, entitled "Black Metal Without Distortion Is Just Surf Rock." And...it is.
The close of this interview was a gut shot. What a beautiful and wise thought to leave with. Great work.
Tell the people you love that you love them, even if it’s scary.